If you know exactly what you want and plan to ask for it by name, don’t go to Melody Supreme. You can’t walk into the small shop on Fourth Street and find whatever you’d like on the shelves. It’s not Amazon.
So what is it? Melody Supreme is the passion project of a man who’s been trying to spread his sonic enthusiasm for more than a decade.
“I am selling records because I love it,” owner Gwenael Berthy says. “I don’t think I could sell socks or shoes. I am going to carry the stuff I like and the used stuff I have found—the random stuff.”
Berthy opened Melody Supreme in 2010. At the time, lots of folks still collected records the old-fashioned way, he says. They’d come in with no set goal in mind, content to browse the collection, hoping to discover something new and interesting.
Times have changed, and records are everywhere—even Target, Berthy laments. But Melody Supreme hasn’t changed.
“It is a question of generation. I am not sure the young generation has the same feeling about records,” Berthy says. “The Apple or iPhone generation, they are not patient. They want everything right now. So, some people enjoy it, some people don’t get it at all.”